This kind of reporting interleaved with storytelling in a really weird voice is frustrating. Why do journalists write like this? What purpose does this word salad serve?
I can do this myself! "On a bald September day, a man walks into a barber shop, languishes at the occupied seats, and voilà, while sensing upcoming bowel movements, he discovers the next great theory of economics."
Cosmos was written in a similar style. Try reading it in Carl Sagan's voice and see if it's any more interesting to you.
The purpose of longform writing is to provide flavour and context, which are important parts of an information diet. Not everything has to be about the freshest facts delivered to your brain as urgently as possible. Just because you've happened across this in a frenzied binge of clicking HN headlines, doesn't mean it was designed to be consumed that way. If you don't feel you have time to sit through a New Yorker article, save it for later.
This is 'Long Form Journalism'. The 'dip in, dip out' paragraph structure is a dead giveaway.
Not always what you're looking for but it can be a good way of cracking into a subject you're unfamiliar with, or a good way of merging the human element with something that would otherwise be quite dry.
By no means a substitute for regular news, but a good complement to it.
Related to unnecessary words inside a newspaper/magazine article, this interview [1] with Georges Simenon is the best example of why those articles look like crap (at least for people like me, I do realize that there are other people with different tastes):
> Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite
> I: What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
> Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
I think it is actually optimized for print magazines where someone can be expected to dip in and out when they have a few minutes on the couch and the publisher has a set number of pages to fill. It's not as well suited to the internet where 25 words surrounded by 10 ads seems to be the norm and 5 minutes is an eternity.
I don't disagree but national geographic, time, and now the same formats transposed into the online world all have their place. They can act as fantastic springboards into underlying news, scientific research, and other further reading in a way that's similar to but far more engaging than a dry wikipedia article.
You can condense the facts into 3 paragraphs but why don't we just go all in and present them as bullet points instead of full sentences?
When I see a five page article, I know that I'll get background information and I might discover something I didn't expect from the title. While you might only be looking for the study results, I like spending my Sunday afternoon reading long articles teaching me all kinds of interesting information I wouldn't have looked up on my own.
And what a shallow, frenetic dystopia it would be if nobody even attempted to write compelling longform anymore. Remember, 90% of everything is crap. Imagine reading 3 disappointing novels and concluding that novels, as a format, were a waste of time!
(Or worse - being unable to appreciate a good novel because you're too impatient for it to get to the exciting bits!)
Compelling means that the reader doesn’t give up after a few paragraphs. I like long form, like I have subscribed to Harper’s since forever, but sometimes an article is just extended and not more interesting.
I find NPR guilty of the same. I want to hear a story about how fear affects the lives of primates. And it begins on a cool October day with thoughts of coffee.
I suspect that it's a holdover from the past. There once was a time when many people had more time to read than they had stuff to read. This kind of writing was fine. Better than right-to-the-point writing, in fact, because it expanded the amount to be read without actually needing to have more to say.
Alternately, it's a way of expanding readership. If you don't know anything about molecular biology, they have to write an article at a layperson's level to explain what they mean. But if you, the reader, don't want to go through the effort of trying to understand even that, then there's this human-interest stuff that may still cause you to decide to buy their magazine.
I'd wholeheartedly agree with your critique if the text was published as a tweet storm.
The thing is, this isn't news reporting at all. It's a popsci writeup of the history of the immune system, the history of the discovery of the immune system and a glimpse into its complexity that uses Covid news as the textual equivalent of a cover image. If you have a print of 20000 Leagues under the Sea and the cover shows the kraken attack, would you complain about the number of chapters that don't contain a kraken at all?
It's because students are being admitted to universities (including ivy league ones) based on informal political quotas. Once inside they don't learn per se but are indoctrinated with the virtues of diversity and tolerance. Nobody should be amazed that when they graduate, they write like a 12 year old: that was the whole point.
I can do this myself! "On a bald September day, a man walks into a barber shop, languishes at the occupied seats, and voilà, while sensing upcoming bowel movements, he discovers the next great theory of economics."